Keen to stress the inclusive nature of its team, the ABPI said it was representative of different sized companies as well as the different geographies within the UK industry.

The UK industry body will also provide a team of its own to support the pharma negotiators and this will be led by ABPI commercial director Alison Clough.

It is currently proposed that from 2014 a value-based pricing (VBP) system, incorporating a broader assessment of a product's worth, will be used to determine prices for medicines that are newly launched onto the UK market, while an updated version of the PPRS will be used to decide the price of branded drugs already available.